Saturday, January 30, 2016

Feminist women might be turning a blind eye to events in Europe, but other women are responding the opposite way: they are urging Western men to reject the influence of feminism and to return to the traditional masculine virtues.

This call to manhood is understandable. Events in Cologne, in particular, showed that Western women cannot rely on the state for protection. Western women are vulnerable without the presence of traditionally masculine men in society.

One of the women seeking change is the Danish journalist Iben Thranholm. She speaks plainly in the attached video about what she believes needs to happen. It's worth watching the video but I've quoted some of her more choice comments below:

We need a sort of male revolution...Men need to take responsibility, to go back to the old male virtues, to defend the women, the children and the culture. It is unbalanced to have no masculine force in society...men have been brought up by women who want them to become women....There is a kind of order in this world and it is based on a complementarity between men and women.

A Canadian reporter, Faith Goldy, followed up on Iben Thranholm's video with an even more straight-talking one of her own. Again, her video is interesting as she pulls no punches in her call for men to re-masculinise - the following excerpts give a sense of what she is about:

Where are our heroes today?...we are in a testosterone recession...Today's feminists are more concerned with appearing xenophobic than actually protecting women...In destroying male hero virtues we have lost our balance in society...banning masculinity has been a failed experiment ...Hey men, here's a tip. Remove your pair from the feminist hands in which they are now held, reattach and revolt.

Finally, there is Swedish journalist, Ingrid Carlqvist, who left it at this:

I think there is so little aggression left in Swedish men (because of feminism) that they can no longer defend their families and their country. Let's hope I'm wrong on that!

I'll comment more on all this in tomorrow's post. I do think it's a positive development that there are women speaking out so clearly on this issue.

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Roz Ward has been working with the Department of Education here in Victoria on a new transgender policy. She was quoted in the papers as complaining that those who were "assigned male at birth" have a hard time participating in girls sports because:

There is a perception that so-called male bodies are physically superior.

James Campbell, writing for the Melbourne Herald Sun, was struck by her use of the phrase "so-called male body":

I was taken aback by Ms Ward's claim that there is no such thing as the male body, or to borrow from Hamlet - that there is nothing either male or female, but thinking makes it so.

You probably think that if someone wants to believe something as obviously crackers as the idea that objectively there is no such thing as a man or a woman, only what we each want to be, well, that is their business. The rest of us will still be free to go on thinking there are men and women, just as we always have.

Go to the website for minus18, a taxpayer outfit that helps same-sex-attracted and transgender youth cope at school and you will see where we are heading.

In a section devoted to the vexed question of the pronouns he, she and they, its website tells the state's youth that while it's an easy mistake to make that "genitals and bodies in general don't reflect anything about a person's pronouns or gender." ["Gender Politics Distorts Reality", 28/01/2016]

James Campbell is criticising here a liberal mindset in which the aim is to make our biological sex not matter. It can be made not to matter either by insisting that what liberals call "gender" - the social expression of our biological sex - is fluid and not dependent on our being male or female, or else by denying that there are only two sexes, male and female, or else by blurring the lines in both respects.

The problem is that this mindset can't just be dismissed as crackpot as it is the state ideology. That's why Roz Ward is being allowed to help write the curriculum for Victorian state schools and James Campbell isn't. The transgender movement is triumphing everywhere because it fits into the "operating system" of society. So we either change the operating system or we can expect crackpot ideas to go mainstream over time and to move beyond criticism.

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Donald Trump was asked by a reporter to define conservatism. The most he could offer was "I think it’s a person that doesn’t want to take risks..a person that wants to conserve."

But nor could the readers at Breitbart do much better. Most commonly they defined conservatism by offering up some version of classical liberalism: individual liberty, constrained federal government, free enterprise.

I left a comment of my own:

Conservatism is not really about not wanting to take risks. It is wanting to conserve the things that are undermined by a liberal ideology. Liberalism begins with the idea that there is nothing of meaning or value existing as part of reality outside the individual. Therefore, what matters is the individual self-defining or self-determining his own meaning and value (the meaning is in the act of choosing, the "agency", rather than in what is actually chosen). Morality in this view is accepting the right of others to do the same thing (hence the moral focus on tolerance, non-discrimination, etc.) For liberals, things that are predetermined, and can't be self-determined, limit human freedom and should be made not to matter. This includes what liberals call "gender" (the social expression of our biological sex) and race/ethny.

Conservatives seek to connect man to the things of meaning and value that transcend him (the goodness of which exist objectively independent of his will). These include aspects of character and virtue; manhood and womanhood; family (including the fulfilment of offices such as fatherhood/motherhood/husband/wife); nature (man's connection to); nation (love of and loyalty toward); a moral code; a church tradition; art and culture that inspires men toward the higher things; and a continuity between generations past, present and future.

I thought afterwards that there was another angle to all this. If you don't believe that there is anything there, only what you put there, then this explains the longstanding liberal tendency to begin with the blank slate individual.

In other words, liberals like to assume as a model that we begin with nothing and then we make of ourselves something according to our own free will and choices. It is a model which works at two levels. At the individual level it is the model of the self-made man. It is assumed that we make something of ourselves at a public level through our careers, or perhaps through sporting or artistic achievements.

This helps to explain why liberals are so morally focused on the idea of equal opportunity in terms of careers, sports and the arts, even at the extreme level of wanting women to be able to advance in the career of a combat soldier. A conservative would be more focused on the transgressive nature of such a step, of its disruption to a healthy relationship between the masculine and feminine, of it not being a fulfilment of womanhood. But these things are simply not "there" for a liberal mind, they are false social constructs without value; what the liberal mind perceives is the chance for a woman to make herself according to her choices, it is this freedom that brings meaning.

(Remember, too, that if you think of people as essentially "choice makers" then the fact of being a woman is hardly relevant - the category itself won't seem that significant in human life, except as a potential factor in having an unequal chance to be self-made. A liberal won't think in terms of "man" and "woman" the way that conservatives do.)

It should be said that this focus on being self-made does potentially give a kind of dynamism to liberal individuals. They won't be content until they have made it professionally in some respect. Conservatives get a sense of meaning from other things, and this can potentially make us less socially ambitious and therefore leave us in a weaker position to influence society. It's something within the conservative mind we might have to acknowledge and overcome.

Even certain aspects of popular culture, such as tattoos, might be linked to liberal assumptions about the human person. If there is nothing meaningful given to us, but only what we ourselves make of ourselves, then perhaps the human body in its natural state isn't meaningful, but is merely a blank canvas, upon which we then make meaning, perhaps by drawing or writing things that express something about our lives or aspirations or personalities. Hence tattoos. It's different, though, if you think that our bodies already, in their given state, have a depth of meaning and express something deeply significant about who we are - if this is your starting point then tattoos can potentially be visually distracting - the surface meaning of the tattoo can distract from the more profound meaning of the body in its natural state.

The idea of things being a blank slate and being given meaning when the human will acts upon them also works at the level of society and the environment. It's noticeable, for instance, that political leaders are judged in a liberal society not for being good stewards or custodians of a certain valued tradition, but for having made changes - preferably changes along liberal lines ("reforms") but if not that, then any kind of changes. Perhaps part of the explanation for this is that liberals see the idea of people acting upon society and the environment as a good in itself - as being a meaning-making virtue.

Again, this does give liberal societies a certain kind of dynamism, even if it sometimes produces ugliness and excess. It makes for motion. The overall logic of liberal societies is ultimately a self-destructive one, but we should acknowledge and seek to match in our own way the dynamic aspect.

Monday, January 25, 2016

You've probably heard the whole "Oscars are racist" thing by now. It seems not to be true that black actors are disadvantaged:

Black actors/actresses in Oscars in the last 20 years:

• 10% of best supporting actor winners were black.
• 20% of best supporting actresses were black.
• 15% of best leading actors were black.
• 5% of best leading actresses were black.

When you calculate the average (10+20+15+5) ÷ 4 = 12.5%.

So, black people are almost perfectly represented in winners, considering their share in the population is 12.6%

Anyway, a white feminist actress by the name of Julie Delpy decided to add to the chorus of complaint by throwing in the idea that women were also victims of film industry discrimination:

...there’s nothing worse than being a woman in this business...Two years ago I said something about the academy being very white male, which is the reality, and I was slashed to pieces by the media. It’s funny; women can’t talk. I sometimes wish I were African American because people don’t bash you afterward. It’s the hardest to be a woman. Feminists is something people hate above all. Nothing worse than being a woman in this business. I really believe that.

You might think that Julie Delpy would be applauded on the left for such a feminist outburst. In fact, it was seen as an unforgivable error. You see, in the leftist hierarchy of oppression, blacks are thought to be much more oppressed than women. White women are at the very bottom of the hierarchy (white men don't even get to be on it).

Julie Delpy

The way the leftist mind works is to think "How dare Julie Delpy claim to occupy the same place of oppression as black people. This shows just how guilty she is of occupying a privileged space. She should know that when it comes to black people she is guilty by virtue of being a white person. All that she can do is to acknowledge this and humbly accept what black people have to say about their oppression."

Julie Delpy tried to apologise for her violation of this leftist view:

I’m very sorry for how I expressed myself. It was never meant to diminish the injustice done to African American artists or to any other people that struggle for equal opportunities and rights, on the contrary. All I was trying to do is to address the issues of inequality of opportunity in the industry for women as well (as I am a woman). I never intended to underestimate anyone else’s struggle! We should stay alert and united and support each other to change this unfair reality and don’t let anyone sabotage our common efforts by distorting the truth.

Common efforts? United? Julie, you're kidding yourself. You think you're equal to others higher than you in the hierarchy of oppression? No way! You have to prostrate yourself a lot more fulsomely than this. In leftist thought you are guilty as an oppressor and have to recognise yourself as such and acknowledge your lack of moral status.

There was, for instance, an avalanche of criticism of her apology at the Jezebel feminist website. This one gives you some idea of the tone of the criticism:

“I’m very sorry (1) for how I expressed myself. It was never meant to diminish the injustice done to African American artists or to any other people that struggle for equal opportunities and rights(2), on the contrary. (3) All I was trying to do is to address the issues of inequality of opportunity in the industry for women as well (as I am a woman)(4). I never intended to underestimate anyone else’s struggle! (5) We should stay alert and united and support each other to change this unfair reality (6) and don’t let anyone sabotage our common efforts by distorting the truth.”(7)

1) End sentence here.
2) It did though. Acknowledge what you are apologizing for; say “it diminished..” as a statement, without qualifiers that excuse you.
3) oh no, don’t even
4) not really the time for more excuses.
5) nobody cares
6) you’re not my friend dummy; you haven’t effectively apologized yet.
7) Are you serious

Do you see from this the kind of self-subordinating, kowtowing posture that is expected from Julie Delpy because of her race? By playing the leftist game she got to feel superior to white men but at the cost of losing all dignity when it comes to dealings with other races.

Is it really worth it, Julie? The game you have accepted is ultimately stacked against you. You are going to lose - you have been assigned a lowly position from which, according to the rules of play, you cannot move.

Japan is a wealthy, modern nation. But it still wants to remain distinctively Japanese. Last year Japan accepted only 27 refugees.

It's a tiny number given Japan's population. Even so, it's difficult to see why Japan should even take this many. Why drop someone from Syria into the middle of Kyoto? How does that benefit anyone? The refugees won't fit into the existing culture and society and the existing culture and society won't uphold its existence by accepting those who can't fit in. It will just lead gradually to demands for a homogeneous Japanese people to give way.

Does that mean Japan shouldn't do anything about refugees? No. Japan can be a good international citizen by donating some of its wealth to rehousing Middle-Eastern refugees somewhere safe in the Middle-East. It seems that Japan has taken this logical step already:

The top five donors [to the UNHCR] in 2012 were the United States, Japan, the European Commission, Sweden and the Netherlands.

What a pity that the European nations can't be as sensible as Japan.

Finland, for instance, has been accepting large numbers of Middle-Eastern refugees, but many have left already because they find the Finnish culture too alienating and the weather too cold:

Almost 70 per cent of Iraqi asylum seekers have given up applications in Finland to go back to their war-torn country.

One Iraqi who decided to return said Finland did not live up to the expectations.

He said: "I don't know what happens to me in Iraq, but here I will die mentally."

Another Middle-Eastern arrival agreed:

"You can tell the world I hate Finland. It's too cold, there's no tea, no restaurants, no bars, nobody on the streets, only cars," 22-year-old Muhammed told AFP in Tornio, as the mercury struggled to inch above 10 degrees Celsius (50 Fahrenheit) on a recent blustery grey day.

Again, there is something absurd about dropping Muhammed into Finland in the first place. The Finnish people have created a way of life in a particular environment that they wish to keep and they should be allowed to do so. Middle-Easterners like Muhammed don't find that way of life congenial - it is logical that they be resettled somewhere more familiar to them.

Friday, January 22, 2016

In my last post I criticised the views of a Christian "conservative," David Mills. He believes that all white Americans are privileged; he quotes approvingly the idea that white privilege is "a life-easing level of advantage that comes with just being Caucasian in America, no matter what your wealth, gender or any other status."

One of my readers pointed out in a comment that, amongst other things, this ignores the issue of class. There are signs that working-class white Americans are struggling:

Class also gets ignored. Recent studies have shown extraordinary increases in death rates among white working class American men. Their lack of privilege is literally killing them. Why don't Christian conservatives express any concern about this?

I checked this out and my reader is correct - there has been an extraordinary rise in mortality rates for middle-aged white Americans (both male and female), especially for those who do not have university education.

Late last year The Atlantic ran a story on this titled "Middle-Aged White Americans are dying of despair". It is as if a terrible epidemic had struck this population group:

“half a million people are dead who should not be dead,” Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics and co-author of the paper, told The Washington Post. “About 40 times the Ebola stats. You’re getting up there with HIV-AIDS.”

Half a million white Americans in the 45 to 54 age group have died prematurely. In the meantime, mortality rates have continued to improve for black and Hispanic Americans in the same demographic. Hispanic Americans have a vastly better (i.e. lesser) middle-aged mortality rate than do white Americans.

Why? The Atlantic puts it down to despair amongst this group - middle-aged, working-class white Americans are dying of despair. How then can they be enjoying a "life-easing level of advantage" when they are dying at a faster rate than other groups?

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

I was very surprised to click on a link and find a post on white privilege written by David Mills. Mills is a former executive editor of First Things, which I had always thought was a somewhat conservative religious periodical. Mills's views on white privilege, however, are indistinguishable from the usual radical secular liberal viewpoint.

Here's something about Mills's post. It might follow the usual far left views, but it is written more calmly and therefore comes across as more reasonable than usual. It's as if a grown up had taken on a childish idea and given it a more polished presentation.

Even so, when you boil down his argument, there's not much there. I tried to explain this in the following comment I left at the site:

The problem with the theory about white privilege is that to make it work the concept of privilege itself has to be narrowed down. In effect it becomes this: "it is a privilege to be the majority ethnic group because you are considered the norm". Which then makes the ethnic Japanese in Japan privileged; the Han Chinese in China privileged and so on. Logically, then, there should be no majority ethnic group anywhere, which then means that no group is in a position to reproduce its own distinctive culture.

Whites are not privileged in other senses of the term. Asian Americans, for instance, do noticeably better than white Americans when it comes to average income; educational outcomes; family stability; professional status and so on. Nor are whites privileged when you look at the global situation: whites are a minority group whose position is everywhere on the decline. Talking about white privilege at this time in history obscures the vulnerable position that nearly all white communities find themselves in.

I could also have mentioned that whites don't really get to benefit from majority status in the kind of easy way that Mills suggests, as we are the group that gets attacked as an oppressor group within the institutions of society, particularly within the schools and universities.

If you do happen to choose to leave a comment at the website I linked to, I'd ask that you make it as calmly reasoned as you can as that is far more likely to have an effect on the readership than anger or indignation.

The Traditional Britain Group has a Facebook page which has been a terrific source of information on the current immigration crisis in Europe.

One post which caught my attention was about a young German woman who couldn't wait to help the immigrants from North Africa and the Middle-East who are currently flooding into Europe. She applied for a job at a migrant reception centre but gradually her experiences disillusioned her.

I've posted the translation provided by the Traditional Britain Group below. It's an interesting read - especially at the end when the young woman admits that she has changed her behaviour now in response to the behaviour of the immigrant men. Again, you would think that Western feminists would be spitting chips over this kind of thing, but it's unlikely you'll hear anything from them, as their focus is on attacking white males.

Anyway, here it is:

Since Autumn 2015 I have worked as my main occupation and as a permanent employee in a Hamburg Initial Reception Centre for refugees. I applied for this job specifically; it was exactly what I wanted to do. When I finally got the job offer in my postbox, I felt so crazily happy about it; finally I would not just be able to help theoretically, but I could do something practical for the refugees.

Accordingly I went in the best of moods to my first day of work at the initial reception centre; I was naturally excited, of course, you always are on your first day of work in a new job, but otherwise I was very happy. My colleagues were engaged and very nice; although I had no direct contact with the refugees, I greeted them full of enthusiasm in the area and found them all just great.

"That was really great here," I thought. In the next few days I dove into the work full of motivation. That would be with the 1500 refugees who were housed there. I was responsible for their advice on social affairs, was supposed to be a point of contact for all of the refugees' social problems, support them in their asylum applications or make doctor's appointments if they needed them.

Well, and then the first refugees came into my office, in which I was to give advice about social affairs - and even after the first few visits I noted that my very positive and idealistic image of them and their behaviour diverged markedly from reality. Of course we should not make sweeping judgements about all refugees; many of them are very friendly, very thankful, very willing to integrate, very happy to be here. But if I am being honest, working with 90% of those I meet is rather unpleasant and not as I imagined it would be in advance.

First, many of them are extremely demanding. They come to me and demand that I should immediately get them a house and a nice car and, ideally, a really good job, because I have to do that, that's why I sit there and they've come all this way. When I reject that and instead try to explain to them that it doesn't work like that, often they become loud or really aggressive. Recently, an Afghan threatened to kill himself. And some Syrians and a group of Afghans explained they would go on hunger strike until I helped them move to another place. They even screamed to one of my colleagues of Arab origin "We'll behead you!" Due to these and other matters, the police are here several times a week.

Second, they often provide very unreliable information. They come to me and have their papers with them and tell a story that simply cannot be true. But they stick to it and I can only be sure once I have spoken to my colleagues about it and they often say that the person was here previously and told their whole story a bit differently. For example, there was one resident who came to me with his deportation notification and asked me what would happen now. I explained to him then he went away. Soon afterwards he came to my colleague and suddenly showed completely new identification papers in another name and said he was this person with another name. Then he wasn't deported, only moved to another camp.

Third, they rarely keep appointments. I make doctor's appointments for the refugees. All of them need to undergo a basic examination, that means X-rays, inoculation and a general check-up. But many of them want to go to other doctors too, like dentists or orthopaedists. Then I make appointments for them, but when it is time for the appointment, often they don't turn up. That happens so often that the doctors have now asked us not to make so many appointments - but what should I do? I can't just reject the request for an appointment only because I suspect that the person asking for it won't turn up.

And fourth, and this for me is the worst: some of the refugees conduct themselves unspeakably towards women. It is well known that it is mainly men on their own that come to us here, around 60% or perhaps even 70%, I would estimate personally. They are all young, around 20, at most 25. And some of them simply do not have any regard for us women. They accept we are there, they don't have a choice, but they don't take us seriously. When as a women I say something to them or try to give them an instruction, they barely listen to me, immediately dismiss it as unimportant and then simply go again to one of my male colleagues. They often only have contemptuous regards left for us women - or pestering. They whistle after you behind your back, call out after you saying something in a foreign language, which I and most of my colleagues don't understand, laugh. That is really very unpleasant. It is has even happened that they have photographed us with a smartphone. Just like that, unasked, even when we protested. And recently I was going up somewhat steep stairs. Some of the men ran after me there, went up the steps with me, laughing the whole time and - I suspect - were talking about me and calling to me.

Female colleagues have told me that similar things have happened to them. But they said that nothing can be done about it. That it's just part of the job here. It happens so often that if every time a criminal complaint was filed against someone or they were transferred, the institution would be significantly more empty. So they ignore it and try not to let it get to them - and so I have also done that. I have just walked on with my eyes to the front when they whistled after me or called out something. I didn't say anything and didn't make a face so as not to strengthen them, not to give me the feeling that they have done me any harm or could influence me.

But that hasn't helped; it's even become worse - speaking honestly: especially in recent weeks with ever more men from North Africa, Morocco, Tunisia or Libya who have come here to the institution. They were even more aggressive. Then I couldn't ignore it any more - and I reacted. To not expose myself to it any more.

Specifically that means: I started to dress differently. I am actually someone who likes to wear tight things - but not any more. I only wear widely cut trousers and highly-enclosed upper garments. I use make-up very little, at most sometimes a cover stick. And it's not only externally that I've changed, to protect myself from this harassment. I act differently. So, on our grounds, I avoid going to places where there are often men on their own. And when I have to do that I try and pass through very quickly and not smile at anyone in case it is misinterpreted.

But mostly I stay in my small office when possible, even throughout the whole day. I don't take the train to or from work - because recently one of my colleagues was followed to the underground station by some of the young men and harassed even in the train. I want to spare myself that so I come in the car.

I know that must sound serious: dressing differently, avoiding specific areas and only taking the car. And I find it frightful myself that I do all that and consider it necessary. But what should I do, what would the alternative be? Just let myself go on being stared at and propositioned; I can't do that. Not much help is to be expected from the official side. Neither on this matter, nor the other problems that we have, not from the Interior ministry and not from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. When you call them, they often don't go to the phone any more.

Actually all that remains for me really is to hand in my notice. But I always ruled that out before; I like my colleagues a lot, the refugee children too. And I was convinced about the job and the whole thing before - it's hard to admit that everything's a bit different than you had imagined. And handing in my notice would naturally be an admission of this. But I'm now thinking about it nonetheless. Many of my colleagues also want to hand in their notices. Because they can't take it any more, because they cannot look at how badly everything is going here and not be able to do anything about it. And if I'm being honest: I also can't take it any more.

The residents of a small town in a rural part of The Netherlands were told that they were going to house 500 of Merkel's immigrants. Permanent change of identity for the local population. To their credit the residents did not just passively accept their fate - 1000 of them protested at a meeting organised by town officials to explain the plan, with some attempting to storm the town hall.

My hope is that at least some of these residents will now become politically active. One outburst of anger won't change things, what's needed is a longer term commitment to challenging the establishment parties and to changing the political culture and values that currently dominate Western countries.

Sunday, January 17, 2016

I have heard before that women in Sweden are subject to harassment on the streets by recently arrived immigrants who do not respect Western women. The reality of this becomes even more apparent when you see an example of it (the Swedish woman being harassed filmed the incident):

If countries like Sweden and Germany continue to pursue open border policies you would think that the situation will only get worse. So what might be the result? In Germany some women are responding already by buying pepper spray and taking self-defence classes. You would think, though, that these would not be effective against groups of young men. In other places (e.g. Finland) young local men are forming vigilante groups. Perhaps as well more police will be hired and they will take a tougher line on street harassment.

But if the culture changes as quickly as it is doing now, chances are that many young women will not want to risk walking the streets by themselves or at night.

I and many other commentators have noticed that most feminists seem unconcerned by these developments and that they want to focus on attacking white men more than they want to uphold the real, everyday position of women. However, there is at least one interesting exception to this. Alice Schwarzer is a radical second generation feminist who is very well known in Germany. There is a good presentation of her views here.

Justin Trudeau is the liberal PM of Canada. Here he is explaining why Canada is able to integrate Muslims better than France:

Countries with a strong national identity — linguistic, religious or cultural — are finding it a challenge to effectively integrate people from different backgrounds. In France, there is still a typical citizen and an atypical citizen. Canada doesn’t have that dynamic.

In his mind, having a strong national identity is a kind of hindrance in the modern world of open borders. And I suppose he's right in this assumption. The issue is, do you really want to give up a strong national identity in order to have open borders? Is the loss of identity and connection involved really worth it?

Something that liberals don't seem to get is that having a deep sense of belonging to such communities is part of the framework for developing our personhood (in a more fundamental way than practising tolerance is). We risk losing something significant of ourselves when the opportunity for belonging to such a community is no longer there.

Saturday, January 16, 2016

Sara Fernanda Giromini founded the Brazilian branch of the radical feminist group Femen. She has now had a major change of heart, after falling in love with a man and having a child:

That was one of the reasons that led me to abandon feminism. Hysterical women inciting hatred and violence against men day and night. When I realized that I had transformed myself into one of them I felt fear and shame. I carried a male in my belly and I couldn't hate him. A movement that makes women slaves of an ideology, it certainly isn't a movement for good and peace. Of course that's not what I was looking for. I love my husband, I love my son, I am happy and free as I ever was in feminism.

For the feminist sect women are not the inspiration, they are prime matter in the worst sense of the term. They are convenient objects useful for the purpose of inflaming hatred against the Christian religion, hatred against men, hatred against the beauty of women, hatred against the equilibrium of families.

Friday, January 15, 2016

Laci Green is a feminist activist with a million subscribers to her YouTube channel. I watched her explain feminism in one of her videos. It was unintentionally very funny - as an example, here is a screenshot of Laci explaining one of feminism's core beliefs:

On November 7th, a welcome to refugees party was organised by Cologne city authorities in the town of Bonn. It did not go well:

The appalling incident, on November 7, 2015, only became known of at all because one of the victims bravely decided to go to the police in the aftermath of the Cologne sex attacks.

She told the city's Express newspaper how she and her friend were surrounded by migrants at the party, which was held on a boat, and were repeatedly groped despite asking the men to stop.

She said: "I guess there were about 100 to 150 asylum seeker men there. I'd only been there a few minutes, and I got the first hand on my breast."

Soon the fondling increased even further until there were "up to four men were pressing themselves on me and my friend at the same time", according to the victim.

She said one migrant then grabbed her and kissed her, at which point she managed to break free and run off with another friend.

Once again, the interests of the asylum seekers were placed above those of the German women:

But the council official responsible for integration matters, Coletta Manemann, who helped organise the 'Refugees Welcome' event, did not report the incidents and has now been accused of a cover-up attempt.

Admitting that she knew about the incident "shortly before Christmas" after talking to students who had been assigned to helping the refugees, she said: "I can't remember any more if I told them that they needed to go to the police or not."

Amazingly she said she later concluded that "the student organisers had learned from the situation" and felt there was no need to make a fuss.

Funny the way some news items appear together. Yesterday, the Daily Mail ran a story about a viral video that mocks white men for succeeding at university on unearned privilege. On the same day a news story broke that the Australian National University has launched an enquiry into an essay farm selling completed assignments to Chinese students.

It's a reminder that white men, if anything, have had to succeed more on their own merit than is the case for most other groups in most other cultures. There has been less of a culture of cheating in Australia than elsewhere; nepotism is not as strong as elsewhere; and middle-class white males do not benefit at all from affirmative action policies. (White males here in Victoria are also very much underrepresented in select entry and high performing state schools.)

The one advantage a small number of white men do have (though other ethnicities have this as well) is a class one. There is still some advantage to belonging to the upper middle-class and having a private school education. It's possible that family connections might help a small number of such men into professional positions.

I don't think it's such a bad thing for a society to have an upper middle-class with a settled way of life (i.e. in which the children are raised to aspire to a high level of education, well-paid professional careers and so on). Why? Because such a situation does give the opportunity for a certain kind of culture to develop, one in which individuals are encouraged toward intellectual pursuits; the fine arts; moral leadership and so on.

The problem today is that status is being decreasingly linked to such things. Instead, people imagine themselves to be distinguished by more superficial attainments (e.g. holding politically correct views; trendiness).

The ideal, it seems to me, is one in which a stable upper middle-class culture does exist; which is oriented to being genuinely cultured and which can provide healthy leadership in society; but which is also open to those with talent and energy.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Still observing the reaction of feminists to events in Cologne. Laurie Penny, a radical English feminist, to her credit did at least try to formulate a response. She wrote a column in the New Statesman which even made a small concession. After nine paragraphs of attacks on the right, she did finally admit that there do exist non-white men who attack women (I can imagine her having written that with clenched teeth). As if to try to restore her soul, she then went back in the next paragraph to blaming a "white supremacist patriarchy" for attacks on women.

So reality did force a small shift in perspective for Laurie Penny. But the next day she was still making comments like this one:

Such a strange outlook. She really has absorbed the idea that men in general, and white men in particular, are organised around the task of oppressing women. It must be terrible to live by this creed. What would you think of your own brothers or your father or your son? You couldn't experience the joy we are supposed to have in the experience of the opposite sex, as you would always be thinking of men as your enemy or oppressor.

Laurie Penny is also missing out on the solidarity that is meant to exist between the men and women of a community. In a healthy society, men will think positively in terms of "our" women, and women will do the same in terms of men. There will be small daily courtesies enacted between the sexes to express this positive regard. Men will naturally be protective of the women of their own community.

We have become scattered as individuals - drawn apart - by the kinds of views held by Laurie Penny.

If you look at Laurie Penny's twitter conversation, there are some good responses:

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

I took a look at two leading feminist websites, Jezebel and Feministe, to see if they thought events in Cologne were worth a mention. Jezebel has finally posted a very brief link to a BBC report (on January 10th, so about 5 days after everyone else); nothing yet from Feministe. But I got a laugh out of Feministe, from this post about Donald Trump:

I thought I hated that @#! twenty years ago when he was just an egomaniacal racist magnate. Little did I know he was also a fascist waiting for the right moment to bloom. And let’s make no mistake. I don’t throw the word “fascist” around lightly.

Monday, January 11, 2016

The European Union is on the warpath against Poland because of a change in media laws there. From what I can tell, the story runs roughly as follows. The media situation in Poland is similar to that in Australia. Most of the media is privately owned (mostly by German publishers) but there is also a state media (similar to our ABC and SBS). Just like in Australia, all of the media is liberal.

A conservative political party, Law and Justice, won the elections recently in Poland. They could see that if the entire media remained liberal, that Poland would inevitably continue to drift in a liberal direction. They wanted to make changes at the top of the state media but had to go through a tribunal which was stacked with liberals. So they passed a law allowing the changes to be made directly.

I'm open to readers having a different view on this, but I think it fair for a conservative government to take on leftist bias in the state media. If a conservative government is serious about what it believes, and in the future of the country, then it can't ignore the issue of media bias.

The new Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski explained the Government's position as follows:

We simply want to cure our state of a few illnesses, so that it can once again be healthy. The previous government pursued a certain leftist concept of politics. As if the world could only move automatically in one direction according to a Marxist model - toward a new mix of races and cultures, a world of cyclists and vegetarians, who rely only on renewable energy and who fight against every form of religion.

That has nothing to do with traditional Polish values...the majority of Poles are moved by: tradition, a sense of history, a love of country, belief in God, and a normal family life between man and woman.

I do want to congratulate the Polish minister for standing so clearly against the view that the world can only ever move in one direction and for articulating a clear alternative direction.

The German political elite has attacked Poland because of the new media laws. The Poles, though, are giving back as good as they get:

Gunther Oettinger, European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, said that Poland should be placed under supervision because of its attempts to establish state control over public media as well as its plans to reform the Constitutional Court. The remarks did not go down well with the Polish Justice Minister, Zbigniew Ziobro.

“I am not in the habit of replying to silly comments on Poland made by foreign politicians,” Ziobro wrote in an open letter to Oettinger, PAP reported...The minister also accused Germany of ‘hushing’ the media in its coverage of New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Cologne.

‘[These events] were for several days hushed up by the German media...I came to the painful conclusion that it’s easier for you to talk about fictitious threats to media freedom in other countries than condemn censorship in your own country," wrote Ziobro.

He has a point, does he not? The German elite did try initially to censor reports of the attacks on German women in Cologne. The state broadcaster in Germany, ZDF, eventually apologised for not reporting the attacks. One ex-politician described the attempt to censor news of the event as follows:

It was "a scandal that it took days for the public media to take up the reports," former Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said, accusing journalists of operating a "cartel of silence and lockdown of news".

There was even some initial censorship of news of the Cologne events on Facebook and Reddit.

It therefore took about five days for the news to spread outside of Cologne and for mainstream news outlets to pick it up.

A spokesman for the Polish President also made this valid point:

In the last eight years we had no pluralism in the public media at all and no European Commissioner, no member of the European Parliament, deplored it.

Finally, a group of Polish volleyball fans unveiled a banner at a match against the German team. The banner reads "Protect your women, not our democracy."

The German Greens just don't want to know. German women were assaulted in Cologne by a crowd of young men from North Africa and the Middle-East. So who then is to blame for what happened? Claudia Roth, a Green Vice-President of the German Parliament, refuses to recognise the migrant link and has instead insisted that "this is about male violence". Similarly, another leading Green, Michael Gwosdz, has responded to events in Cologne by claiming that "every man is a potential rapist".

Very easy for the left, ideologically, to shift the blame to all men. They can then refuse to recognise the problem they have helped to bring about.

More positively, there was a demonstration of around 3000 people in Cologne organised by a group called Pegida to protest what happened on New Year's Eve. One of the speakers was an Englishman, Tommy Robinson. I don't know much about his politics, but he was right when he told the protesters:

it is our God-given right and duty to protect our women. It’s what men do.

In a healthy, traditional society men and women are not set against each other they way they are in modern liberal societies. And men do think in terms of "our women," just as women think in terms of "our men" And, yes, the protector role of men is taken seriously.

I also had a quick look at the website of a new German political party, Alternative for Germany. It has two party representatives writing about events in Cologne. Both uncompromisingly reject the open borders policy of Angela Merkel. Frauke Petry, for instance, writes about the Cologne attacks that:

Here we see the terrible consequences of catastrophic asylum and immigration policies in the living reality of Germany in the year 2016...Germany finally needs again a government which is ready to bear responsibility for its own citizens.

Jörg Meuthen writes:

It has become clear how Merkel's naïve "We'll manage it" has plunged our society into a dramatic crisis. The acts of violence on New Year's Eve are the first effects of a dangerous mixture of uncontrolled immigration, obvious government failure, and political suppression of a self-created reality.

Opinion polls do show a steady growth in support for Alternative for Germany over the past few months, roughly doubling from 4.5% to 9.0%. That's nearly one in every ten Germans - which is something of an achievement for a new party. Even so, you would hope that a larger number of Germans might start to question the more established parties, given the radical effects of the current open borders policy.

Sunday, January 10, 2016

I've been trying to find feminists speaking out against what happened in Cologne, without much success. However, one story has emerged of an artist, Milo Moire, who protested by standing naked outside Cologne Cathedral. Her explanation for her action was revealing:

"I stand for women's freedom to move freely. For the things we've achieved in the past 50 years – for women's emancipation," Moiré told Bild.

"I don't want people to trample on these values and for women to have to adapt themselves. Women must be able to live their values of freedom, with self-determination and self-awareness," she said.

Asked why she had decided to protest naked, Moiré said "I am firmly convinced that women will no longer be treated as sex objects when a naked woman is treated with as much respect as a clothed one."

You might think that this stands in opposition to what happened in Cologne, because it is promoting Western values rather than Islamic ones. But really it is just more of what led to Cologne in the first place.

If the primary value you stand for is a freedom of individual self-determination, then that will include not just a freedom to stand naked outside Cologne Cathedral, but also a freedom to decide in what country you will live and what nationality you will be. Which means a freedom of movement across borders. Which means millions of young Arab and North African men moving into German cities. Which means events in Cologne.

So Milo Moire is part of the problem and not the solution. To be part of the solution means recognising that there are things of value in life - goods - apart from individual choice, that individuals and communities are rightly oriented to.

If you are a religious traditionalist, you might see these goods as real essences, i.e. of being inherently good in their nature. You might, for instance, see a national tradition as a distinct expression of a human collective that has an essential quality that is good, and that rightly draws those belonging to it to a sense of love for it and a willingness to defend it in order to pass it on to future generations.

Secular traditionalists might not see things in terms of essences, but they can still recognise the value of distinct cultures; of the human need for identity and belonging; and of the wisdom of maintaining strength and security through some degree of homogeneity.

In a liberal society, none of these goods, religious or secular, are allowed to matter, because the overriding value is always thought to be the one held to by Milo Moire.

The freedom to stand naked outside a cathedral is a dubious and trivial one. The freedom not to be assaulted as a result of open door migration policies is a more serious one. If all you focus on is individual self-determination you get to have the first, trivial kind of freedom. If you want the more serious freedoms to survive, you have to be willing to take a larger view of what kinds of goods matter and how they can be upheld.

Friday, January 08, 2016

So more than 1000 North African men sexually attacked and terrified 100 German women on New Year's Eve in the German city of Cologne:

One of the victims, identified only as Katja L, told the Kölner Express:
“When we came out of the station, we were very surprised by the group we met, which was made up only of foreign men…We walked through the group of men, there was a tunnel through them, we walked through…I was groped everywhere. It was a nightmare. Although we shouted and hit them, they men didn’t stop. I was horrified and I think I was touched around 100 times over the 200 metres.”

One investigator told the Kölner Express: “The female victims were so badly pushed about, they had heavy bruises on their breasts and behinds.”

White feminists love to attack white men for just about anything. But what happens when there is a clear case of white women being attacked by non-white men? Who will the feminists then choose to support? Will they still support white women? Or will they prefer to support the immigrant men?

I had a look at the Twitter feed of Clementine Ford, one of the more outspoken feminists here in Australia. Her way of coping with the dilemma is to find ways to continue to attack white men. For instance, she wrote:

Thursday, January 07, 2016

There is a major phone company here in Australia called Optus. Optus has been putting adverts up in shopping centres written in Arabic, hoping to appeal to that demographic. Some of the locals complained and were then given little "lessons" in diversity by an Optus representative called Dan. Dan is now a hero on the left for doing so - he is being hailed as an anti-racist etc.

Dan, however, is far from being the complete man. He told one customer, in defence of the Optus advertisements:

What are countries other than lines on a map?

Dan is not deep, not when it comes to really appreciating national diversity. For him, nations are just lines on a map. He is an outsider to national culture, and yet he is very ready to lecture others on the issue. Better for him just to be honest and say "I am numb to all this, I don't have it in me, it's not something that I can appreciate, I am just an outside observer."

What I am trying to say, in a nutshell, is that Dan has outed himself as being decultured - at least in the sense of identifying with a cultural tradition of his own; of having a love for it; of seeking its preservation; and of wanting to add to it. And this represents a loss in life. It is not something to be admired or wished for, but a loss of part of the emotional richness of life and a loss of part of our human identity, one that links us closely to people and place and to generations past and present.

Tuesday, January 05, 2016

News is coming through of events in the Germany city of Cologne on New Year's Eve. A group of 1000 men of North African origin gathered near the main railway station, threw firecrackers into the crowd and then used the disturbance to rob the locals and to sexually assault a large number of German women. There appear to have been at least 35 sexual assaults. Cologne's police chief described it as "a completely new dimension of crime".

The incident is now being reported in the mainstream media. You can find reports here, here and here.

Update: According to the latest reports, there were 2000 men of north African origin involved; similar incidents have occurred in Hamburg and Stuttgart; and a town councillor has warned that the areas around the main railway station and the famous cathedral in Cologne should now be considered "no-go" areas.

The transsexual issue is big at the moment. My main concern is that the issue is being used by liberals to further attack the significance of our biological sex - the fact of being born a man or a woman and what this means for our identity and our way of being.

However, another concern is that children are being encouraged to change sexes. I've been reading the life story of an American woman called Rachel Reiland and it illustrates the dangers involved here. Rachel Reiland tells early on in her book that she believed she had been born in the wrong body:

I wasn't like the other little girls. I hated dolls and other “girly,” pink toys. I hated being a girl more than anything. I wasn't any good at it. If I had been a boy, things would have been different. But somehow God put me into a girl's body by mistake. I wondered if I would go to hell for daring to think God made a mistake.

You might think from reading this that Rachel Reiland might be a candidate for the sex change procedures that are currently being encouraged and that this would then solve "God's mistake".

Rachel Reiland grew up, married, had children and then had a mental health collapse. She went to see a psychiatrist who was clever enough to recognise what the real, underlying problem was. The "gender dysphoria" was a symptom of something else, namely a condition called borderline personality disorder, which is thought to affect about 5% of the population.

With the help of her capable psychiatrist, and intensive therapy, she eventually recovered. The point to be made is that if she had undergone a sex reassignment it would not have cured what was really ailing her. She would still have suffered from a confusion in her identity; from periods of dissociation; from a sense of not fitting in; from periods of depression; and from a sense of failure in life - as these stem from the borderline disorder and not from chromosomal issues.

We put young white men through a hiring simulation for an entry-level job at a fictional technology firm. For half of the “applicants,” the firm’s recruitment materials briefly mentioned its pro-diversity values. For the other half, the materials did not mention diversity. In all other ways, the firm was described identically. All of the applicants then underwent a standardized job interview while we videotaped their performance and measured their cardiovascular stress responses.

Compared to white men interviewing at the company that did not mention diversity, white men interviewing for the pro-diversity company expected more unfair treatment and discrimination against whites. They also performed more poorly in the job interview, as judged by independent raters. And their cardiovascular responses during the interview revealed that they were more stressed.

Thus, pro-diversity messages signaled to these white men that they might be undervalued and discriminated against. These concerns interfered with their interview performance and caused their bodies to respond as if they were under threat. Importantly, diversity messages led to these effects regardless of these men’s political ideology, attitudes toward minority groups, beliefs about the prevalence of discrimination against whites, or beliefs about the fairness of the world. This suggests just how widespread negative responses to diversity may be among white men: the responses exist even among those who endorse the tenets of diversity and inclusion.

So even leftist white men feel an environment to be more hostile and threatening, to the point that their cardiovascular condition is negatively affected, when diversity materials are promoted.

Monday, January 04, 2016

I've often written that liberals want to make our biological sex not matter. Just to help prove my point here is the latest offering from a UK MP, Maria Miller. She wants a person's sex to be removed from documents such as passports and driver's licences. She said in support of this:

As a society and a government we should be looking at ways of trying to strip back talking about gender...what does it matter what someone's sex is?

She is not a radical communist but a member of the Conservative Party - as such she is an establishment liberal following the state ideology.

I want to stress this point because there are plenty of Daily Mail readers who criticise her in the reader comments, but it is mostly along the lines that she is stupid or that it is political correctness gone mad.

She is not stupid. She is someone who is clever enough to understand the logic of the ruling ideology, she just isn't clever enough to consider the destructive aspects of it. In a sense, she is a woman trapped within the intellectual and moral assumptions of her own times.

Nothing will change until the state ideology is clearly identified, effectively criticised and finally jettisoned.

Friday, January 01, 2016

The Daily Mail is running a story claiming that women were historically persecuted by the law here in Victoria. The evidence has been cherry picked. Two examples are given: an Italian migrant who killed a woman in 1937 but whose charge was reduced from murder to manslaughter, and a woman who was jailed for nine months for bigamy.

The statistical evidence paints a different picture, namely that it is women who have been more leniently treated than men when it comes to sentencing:

...the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that 63.3% of men who were sentenced in higher courts received a penalty of imprisonment, compared to just 46.7% of women.

Women were also seen to receive more lenient prison sentences, with an average term of imprisonment of 42.4 months, compared to 60.3 months for men.

This apparent gender bias extended beyond penalties of imprisonment – one study found that male drink drivers generally received fines which were 9.7% higher than those received by women for the same offence, and received disqualification periods which were 22.2% longer.

In 2010, a study attempted to consolidate data obtained from courts to determine whether:

1.Women were less likely than men to be sent to prison for similar offences,
2.Those sent to prison received lighter sentences, and
3.Magistrates and judges treated offending behaviours and histories differently based on a person’s sex.

The study found that gender had a direct impact on a judicial officer’s decision to send a person to prison – and that men were 1.73 times more likely to be sent to prison compared to women.

It further found that men received slightly harsher prison sentences, which were on average 1.16 months longer than those received by women.

The researchers then considered the impact of factors such as a person’s prior criminal history, their decision to plead guilty, and the number of charges they were facing.

Again, they found that male and female offenders were treated very differently – a male’s criminal history was given more weight compared to that of females – and generally meant that they received a harsher sentence

There has been resistance to the idea that men and women should receive similar sentences. In the UK, for instance, judges were advised back in 2010 to be more lenient in their sentencing with women than with men.